Hi. It’s been a time, but it’s been a time for healing and planning and preparing. We have let a couple of cycles pass since we lost Rune and are planning to try again in the coming cycle! Huzzah!

I am making this super fast because it is almost time to get things ready for din din time..

After forwarding the article in the Washington Post to the editor of our local paper, Kelly Virden, I was interviewed, along with two other local homebirthers-both friends of mine-for our local paper. Here is the article.

I am happy with it, though I am a tad disappointed that nothing regarding world statistics regarding birth were mentioned, nothing regarding the safety stats of home vs hospital, nothing to the tune of information, only our stories. Don’t get me wrong, I really think that our three stories are crucial to changing mindsets, to helping wimmin realize their innate abilities, but the fact checker in me would have liked to see more to the whys of it instead of just the stories. One thing in my bit of the article that was actually in err, was that I sought prenatal care. I did but only through 20 weeks thereabout, when I was tired of the condescension of the local MDs. I am interested to see what kind of support and backlash we three get over this article.

My breasts are fuller than normal. There is extra milk and Zoe is drowning when she latches on. I cry when she latches on-not because it hurts, because, let’s face it, I am a nursing pro by now; but because there is no extra babe to take in the milk meant to feed him.

Thank you everyone, for your blessings and well wishes. It’s been an incredibly difficult few days.

We had a burial last night in our Sacred Place. We named the baby Rune Dustin and I will have a complete story at some point, when I can see well enough to write. It helps me to write. it always has. Rob and I are both suffering terribly as this babe was so wanted and planned for. We have given him up to the Goddess, though and she will mother him while I can’t.

Here is a photo of our altar from last night. We all definitely felt the generations with us while we mourned and buried our sweet babe.

Rune is in the sugar jar. It’s pretty old one I found with an incomplete set from Japan. Rob is chiseling a stone with his name on it as a marker.

Thanks again for all of your blessings, here, via email, telephone calls from those who know us in real life and the few of you across the internet. They mean a lot more than you can know.

I am going to toolize the only General Practicioner that I respect in our community for her doppler today because-for the first time in a pregnancy-I was spotting and it made me lose my mind. She didn’t use the doppler. Instead she used the speculum to just look at my cervix which was closed with no blood around it! YAY!

I didn’t sleep at all last night and I am terrified. I have a little peace if I do miscarry, because I dreamed it shortly after Zoe was born that I got pg, birthed a dead babe and then got pg and birthed a healthy live one. Despite the preparation, I am still freaked out completely and lost it a few times last night. Should worse come to worse, I will labor this loss and have it at home, just as we would a healthy babe.

I have heard that third pregnancies are the wacky ones, so who knows, maybe this is just that, as I don’t have any other symptoms of loss. (this is something she mentioned as well!)

I will keep you updated, but I just wanted to ask that you send some positive energies this way and envision this babe held on tight in my uterus and staying healthy and safe. (thus far we are confident that Sprout is fine. before checking my cervix, blood was drawn and they will test hormone levels just to be on the safe side. Dr. Malling is confident, though, with my cervix closed, that all is fine and it was probably some extra implantation blood. Baby is holding on tight!)

YAAAY! Finally people are realizing that co-sleeping is normal, natural and necessary!!

The Harvard University Gazette featured this article a number of years ago…well, about 10 years ag, in fact.

“Parents should recognize that having their babies cry unnecessarily harms the baby permanently,” Commons said. “It changes the nervous system so they’re overly sensitive to future trauma.”

“The pair say that American childrearing practices are influenced by fears that children will grow up dependent. But they say that parents are on the wrong track: physical contact and reassurance will make children more secure and better able to form adult relationships when they finally head out on their own.

“We’ve stressed independence so much that it’s having some very negative side effects,” Miller said.”

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YOU DON’T SAY!?!? My Auntie (the meanest auntie in the whole wide world 😉 ) and my cousin, who is a few months younger than I am and has a small son (I think he is three) were here a couple of months ago for a short visit. We co-sleep to the extent that if we are not in bed, neither is Zoe. She might be in one of our laps onthe couch while we read, or watch a little tube, or listen to the radio, or if we are up doing something after the girls go to sleep, Zoe will lay on the couch or our super huge ottoman (it’s HUGE, so co-sleepers, worry not!) My cousin, asking very caringly, “won’t sleeping like that make her dependent? ” In a word I answered her “nope.” I went on further to let her know a bit about our parenting philosophy, that it is INTERDEPENDENCE we are attempting to achieve, not independence. While we do not molly coddle our girls, we don’t dismiss them, either and we attend to their emotional needs when they need it and then some. My kids are so damned independent at times it isn’t even funny, but they have a balance, already at their young ages. Tehy know what their personal boundaries are and when they need to run to mom or dad.

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“Besides fears of dependence, the pair said other factors have helped form our childrearing practices, including fears that children would interfere with sex if they shared their parents’ room and doctors’ concerns that a baby would be injured by a parent rolling on it if the parent and baby shared the bed. Additionally, the nation’s growing wealth has helped the trend toward separation by giving families the means to buy larger homes with separate rooms for children.

The result, Commons and Miller said, is a nation that doesn’t like caring for its own children, a violent nation marked by loose, nonphysical relationships.

“I think there’s a real resistance in this culture to caring for children,” Commons said. But “punishment and abandonment has never been a good way to get warm, caring, independent people.”

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I am of a firm and completely convinced opinion that the disconnect we have anymore among people is because people cater to their children, but do not care for their children. Parents are so concerned with giving everything to their kids, that they forget the one thing the kids NEED, their parents.

As for sex, Rob and I have an amazing sex life, not to brag too much. He shared with me a conversation he had with his boss the other day (keep in mind, these men are mechanics…foul foul men when with one another! LOL)

BOSS: what you doing when you get home?

ROB: More work. My working never ends. (it really doesn’t! the man is a freakin’ workhorse)

BOSS: What are you talking about? Your job is done, Tasha is pregnant.

ROB: Are you kidding me? Now is when the real work begins. Now I have to deal with the insatiable lust.

BOSS: You poor, poor man.

ROB: Yeah, it’s rough.

Believe you me, our bed is not the only place that is fun for love making! We are creative and inventive and sometimes just plain crazy! Sex is never an issue.

Rolling over onto the babe, well, considering I never drink more than a drink when I drink alcohol, I am never going to bed with the babe while intoxicated. Rob sleeps on the sofa when he has been drinking. Both of us are light sleepers and VERY aware that our child lies between us. there is no rolling over the baby. Period.

Regarding the last bit that I quoted, I completely agree. We are so out of touch with children. They are, more than any other generation, in my opinion, to be seen (with all of their stuff that mom and dad got for them) and not heard (who could hear them anyhow with earbuds in all the time?) then we stick them into daycare centers until 5 and 6 o’clock at night, bring them home, throw some groceries (read: fast food) down their throats, bathe them and put them to bed in front of dvds or tv. We wake them in the morning, according to OUR schedule, and tote them off into the adult world to do it all over again (I didn’t factor in the over committing, soccer, dance, swim, scouts, etc. of children.) Way to go, America! Now that is what I call stellar parenting!

I think I will end this mini-rant by saying that I am not sorry for anything I have written or will write about my opinion ont he state of parenting in our Western culture. I think that collectively, it eats. It eats hard and rotten. Unless parents wake up and realize that THEY are the most important thing they can give their children, then society as we know it will continue to decline and we will become evermore disconnected until we don’t talk at all. We don’t touch at all. We don’t cry or laugh or yell at all.

My children will not be a part of that. They will not be emotionless robots catering to societies demands.

I like the song in this radio show “So much better when you don’t wait for the ‘experts’ to come…” (quotation mine)

There is a spot about UC as well and the midwife talking about it seems very supportive of it as a womon’s choice. I was pleased with this show.

The midwife also discussed the film “Psalm and Zoya” which is the documentation of Mindy Gorchenko‘s birth of her twins, the first of which vertex and the second was a footling breech. Both babies were born unassisted and peacefully while her husband filmed their arrival.

I own that film and I have to say I love it. It is hilarious at times, and always intense. I have it loaned out to a friend right now who is wanting a UC for her next birth. She has three babies, the last two were born with midwives at a birth center that is 2 hours away. She doesn’t want to go through that again, as she almost didn’t make it with the most recent baby. She and her husband are both highly self aware and very educated people as well and have no qualms other than the mess (which, really, there is not as much mess with birth as people tend to think.)

Don’t push! The pushing stage of birth is coached in most hospitals and involves the attendants telling the birthing woman when her cervix is fully open (dilated) and encouraging her to give long, strong pushes with each contraction.Previous research shows that coached pushing does not improve the short-term outcome for mothers and babies, except when the baby needs to be born as soon as possible.

This study, conducted by Schaffer and colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, May 2005, randomized 325 women giving birth to coached or uncoached pushing.

Three months later, they measured the pelvic floor and bladder function of 128 of these new mothers.1

Average weekly hours worked as an unpaid family caregiver (all respondents)

209.6

Your “net worth” as an unpaid family caregiver

$3487

Average “net worth” as an unpaid family caregiver (all respondents)

$2,685.82

Number of respondents

5933

Go here to find out what you are worth, then read up on how Motherhood-or being an unpaid caregiver in general-is a huge risk to becoming impoverished in our country.

*Results are your weekly worth. Obviously to find your annual worth multiply by 52. Maybe subtract a week for vacation time…or not as most vacations are going to be family vacations-no? So you are still on the job.